An Indian researcher married to a Palestinian American is set to be deported from the US for “Hamas propaganda and promoting anti-Semitism”.

Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, was arrested outside his residence on Monday night. He is reportedly in detention at the Alexandria international airport in Louisiana.

“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” US assistant secretary of homeland security, Tricia McLaughlin, posted on X.

“Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior adviser to Hamas. The Secretary of State issued a determination on March 15, 2025, that Suri’s activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable….”

Suri, who has a PhD from the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, is married to US citizen Mapheze Saleh.

In 2018, when the couple lived in New Delhi, a Hindustan Times report had described her as the daughter of “Ahamed Yousef, a former deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government in Gaza, (who) now heads The House of Wisdom Institute (HoW) for conflict resolution, which provides courses in humanitarian law and governance”.

Suri’s arrest comes soon after the “self-deportation” of Indian student Ranjani Srinivasan following the revocation of her student visa, and the arrest of Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the US.

Both were students of New York’s Columbia University and had spoken out against Israel’s military operations in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria since 2023, which have claimed around 70,000 lives.

News site Politico reported: “According to Suri’s petition for release, he was put in deportation proceedings under the same rarely used provision of immigration law that the government has invoked to try to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and green card holder who led pro-Palestinian protests on campus.

“That provision gives the secretary of state the power to deport noncitizens if the secretary determines that their continued presence in the US would threaten foreign policy. Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, his petition says. His detention and petition have not been previously reported.”

Politico added: “The petition says the couple has ‘long been doxxed and smeared’ on anonymously run, far-right websites due to their support for Palestinian rights.”

Doxxing is the act of publicising personal information about an individual or organisation, usually through the Internet and without their consent.

In an email to the media, quoted by US news outlets, Suri’s lawyer Hassan Ahmad said: “If an accomplished scholar who focuses on conflict resolution is whom the government decides is bad for foreign policy, then perhaps the problem is with the government, not the scholar.”

The Trump administration has labelled protests against Israel’s offensive — including those by Jewish groups -- as anti-Semitic. Israel has justified its offensive as retaliation for a Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 that claimed more than 1,000 lives.